Seems these days we have forgotten the essence of what America was supposed to be about and how we got there.

The founders understood tyranny to be multifold: unseemly power in the hands of an executive – despotic king or other, invasion of privacy by unwarranted search and seizure, the perils of a standing army, the vileness of cruel and unusual punishment and imprisonment without proof, or imprisonment without a specified release date. They knew about persecution due to guilt by association. They understood the right to assembly. They got it: how power tended to coalesce in the hands of a few.

The Founders may have failed in a few respects: slavery continued, women were not included in the vote. Nonetheless they built a structure of checks and balances, a bill of rights and a constitution which enabled the nation to become fairer and freer, a work in progress.

In 1761, lawyer James Otis, Jr. of West Barnstable understood, protesting the Crown's “Intolerable Acts” that violated the rights of colonists. There was the Quartering Act allowing British troops to be stationed anywhere, including your home. There were acts that funded these troops by unwanted taxes. There was the Excise Act, which gave vast powers to search and seize goods by a Writ of Assistance.

Otis argued that “Every one with this writ may be a tyrant; if this commission be legal, a tyrant in a legal manner, also, may control, imprison, or murder any one within the realm. In the next place, it is perpetual; there is no return.”

Sam Adams wrote that Otis “asserted that the security of these rights to life, liberty, and property had been the object of all those struggles against arbitrary power, temporal and spiritual, civil and political, military and ecclesiastical, in every age.” Adams credited Otis with inspiring the Revolution.

The strength of the Fourth Amendment is also attributed to Otis. Now we face its and other violations of the Constitution, every minute of every day: spying on citizens and journalists; violation of the Eighth, Sixth and Fifth amendments, Guantanamo; violating the First Amendment: the criminalization of dissent. The founders would be appalled at the takeover of government and the Kafkaesque rewriting of laws to favor military contractors and corporations as they would be appalled by the Patriot Act.

Daniel Ellsberg writes, “Since 9/11, there has been, at first secretly but increasingly openly, a revocation of the bill of rights for which this country fought over 200 years ago. In particular, the fourth and fifth amendments of the US constitution, which safeguard citizens from unwarranted intrusion by the government into their private lives, have been virtually suspended."

Yet a few patriots understand what is at stake. Whistle-blower William Binney of the NSA who helped design the all-encompassing networks; Thomas Drake; James Bamford, who writes extensively on NSA; Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning, Assange. (And I must reiterate that no lives have been harmed by any of the Manning and Assange revelations, according to the military itself.)

It is not just spying, but attitudes of totalitarian militarism, of cruelty which allows endless wars, of greed which justifies the violation of our environment, contempt for the poor, weak and less able, which all contribute to the overturning of the benevolent framework of our government.